...the trapped rifle smoke eddied in the hollows like heavy fog, and the Confederates who fought here recalled a half-blind advance through an unending din, and when they tried to tell about it they could speak only of isolated bits of action that had no particular sequence or meaning...riderless horses galloping off to nowhere, stretcher bearers stumbling in and out of vision...and all the time, without ever a break or a pause, the crashing tumult of sound which at least one veteran, long afterward, called the most terrible noise he heard in the war except possibly for Spotsylvania Court House. ...Trying to sum it all up, a Southern gunner wrote to his wife: "Satan was holding his orgies on earth & death supped fat on the feast" which, after all, may have been as good a way as any to describe it. Catton, Terrible Swift Sword, The Seven Days, 330.

Over time when we are deprived of one sense our others try to compensate. Here there was no time, hence no compensation just deprivation. Terror is more acute for not being fully sensed, thus not fully processed into understanding by our minds. Catton enables us to feel their terror through their lack of full sight impressions. We see as they did "the riderless horses galloping off to nowhere", we know as they knew what they signified but neither saw the proximate cause. When we lack rational understanding we turn to superstition and the supernatural.